Sunday, 29 June 2014

"Those who do not
learn from history, and doomed to repeat it."That seems to be the
fate about to befall us, whoever wins the 2015 general election.

The causes of the
economic crash are presented by the Westminster politicians in glib terms for
short-term political gain.On the one hand, George Osborne tells us our
economic problems are all the fault of the last Labour government for
over-spending, as if excess nurses' pay or teachers' pensions caused banks
around the world to collapse.

This fatuous nonsense
deserves no time, but the retort from Ed Balls, that the last Labour Government can't be blamed for the collapse of Lehman Brothers, deserves
little more.The US bank crashed in 2008, but here in the UK Northern Rock had
collapsed in 2007.Our economy was not an innocent bystander in the crash,
buffeted by the fall-out of the US sub-prime crisis.

We have to accept
responsibility. And that means looking beyond glib banker-bashing, too.The
crash wasn't caused by a few rotten apples in a few dodgy barrels. The crash
was the inevitable consequence of the structural weaknesses in our economy.

Those structural
weaknesses were as a result of deliberate policies by successive governments to
reshape the UK economy: rolling back the state by privatising, deregulating, and
handing over large swathes of industry and economic power to an unaccountable
cabal of corporations and oligarchs.

This left our society
more unequal, reducing people's incomes and depressing consumer demand.Consumer credit and asset bubbles were there to fill in the gaps. But
transferring housing into a speculative commodity only caused greater crises,
social and economic.Deregulating finance and undermining other sectors left
our economy unbalanced, fragile and unstable.

And what is
astonishing, after the deepest and
longest depression since the 1870s, is that this economic orthodoxy remains intact, the banks remain
lightly regulated, and there is little discussion in (and even less concrete
action from) the hallowed halls of Westminster to fundamentally change our
economy.

What I find most
encouraging though, is that despite no political parties or organisations
campaigning vigorously for it, the British public remains in favour of significant
changesTwo-thirds majorities want the railways, energy companies and Royal
Mail brought into public ownership, and by an even larger margin people want
higher taxes on the highest earners.

So why is the
Westminster consensus so out of step?Actually, the economic crisis is and
always was a political crisis, a crisis of democracy.Not just because no
party is properly representing people's economic views, but also because too
much economic power now resides outside the democratic realm.

By privatising publicly
funded assets, we handed over control of our water, electricity, gas, telecoms,
and later railways and postal service, to privateers.In return they charged us
more, asset stripped, and failed to invest. Leaving our infrastructure well
behind that of other major economies.

By reducing taxation on
capital, high incomes and corporations, more wealth has now been accumulated by
that infamous one per cent.We instead now tax the incomes of the poorest at a higher
rate than those of the richest.

By asset stripping our
economy and allowing only the richest to share the proceeds, our country is
scarred by a grotesque inequality in which we cap benefits going to the
poorest, but not the rents charged by the richest.

This is the morality of
an economy rigged to benefit only those at the top.If we want not only a moral economy, but also a stable one, then we have to redistribute wealth and power.

That means, as Tony
Benn put it, "shifting power from the wallet to the ballot."In
practice putting those parts of our economy that are too important to fail, including the banks, in democratic public
ownership and giving people economic rights: to not live in poverty, to decent
housing, and in the workplace.

We need an economy that
works for us.That means taking on some very powerful vested interests,
just as it did when the Chartists, trade unionists and Suffragettes fought to
get rights, too.If we are to learn anything from
our history, it is that social movements change history, and that while the one per cent have the billions, the 99 per cent have the numbers.We have to get organised.Andrew
Fisher is the author ofThe Failed Experiment - and how to
build an economy that works.

Friday, 27 June 2014

Narendra
Modi is someone to be watched with great care.Not only Pakistan, not only
China, and not only Southeast Asia, have good reason to be wary of him.The
Western world as well should take great care, and not welcome him with the
enthusiasm of a warm ally , as, for example, David Cameron and Barack Obama seem
to have done already.

In
the Anglosphere, I feel there may be a certain kind of patronising and
infantilising Orientalism at play, of the same sort which makes Buddhism so
popular amongst a certain segment of white suburban liberals.That surrounds
Hinduism as well in the mystique of its fuzzy, deracinated, ‘spiritual’, New Age
permutations while refusing to take a good, hard look at the elements which might
not be so palatable.The extremist ideology of Hindutva encapsulates and
magnifies too many of these unpalatable elements, even though the inspiration
for the ideology is, in its entirety, Western.

Hindutva
is essentially a deliberately militarised middle-class striving after a ‘pure’
Hindu national and cultural essence, informed by an inflated sense of past
colonial grievances and of disdain for any form of cultural expression
considered ‘non-Hindu’, including Christianity and Islam.The forefather of
Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, exhorted his followers to ‘Hinduise all
politics and militarise Hindudom, and resurrection of our Hindu Nation is bound
to follow’.Other leaders in its first generation, in particular Bal Thackeray,
praised, admired and deliberately sought to emulate Mussolini and
Hitler.

The
organised rapes, beatings and killings of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which
Modi’s personal complicity as the leader of the provincial government is still
a matter of dispute, and of Christians in Orissa in and after 2008, are prime
examples of the nature of this virulent and violent form of far-right political
Hinduism.The three civil bodies of the Hindutva movement: Vishva Hindu
Parishad (VHP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS – of which Modi was a member)
and Bajrang Dal, all took part in the violence in each case.To this day,
Gujarat, in spite of its vaunted economic achievements, still shamefully
retains also the highest rate of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim communal
violence.

Modi
himself, in the position of India’s Prime Minister, may not be able to do as much damage or
as much good as either his most strident detractors or his most fervent fans
tend to think.No one is well-served by turning India into a pariah state over
his election.But his rise does signal a sea-change in Indian politics which
has been in motion since at least 2002, channelling the country’s continuing
economic frustrations into old but nevertheless virulent forms of identity
politics.This heightened belligerence will also, of course, siphon over into
foreign relations with his immediate neighbours such as China, and into India’s
internal relations, particularly those based on caste and class.

But
for all their vaunted nationalism, Modi and his party seem to fail the
realisation that the independence of the Indian nation is guaranteed only by
the one facet of that nationalism which they do not adopt: that in the economic
realm.The independence of India’s small farmers from foreign agricultural
multinationals seeking to make fortunes on their backs is not an independence
valued by the BJP or by the RSS, willing though they are to exploit said
farmers’ frustrations and pin them on the Muslims and the Christians.Yes,
great care should be taken now with India, particularly if and when the
geopolitical fractures with her northeastern neighbour begin to emerge.

Speaking
of which, the RSS and the VHP both continue to receive the enthusiastic support
of one Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Famous though he is for
troubles he does not and cannot make for the government in the country of his
birth, and which enjoy broad support only amongst Tibetan White émigrés,
unfortunately he has a great deal of clout in the West.

And, indeed, in India, where he stands to do great damage to the civil society.

In
what other universe but the funhouse mirror of Europolitics could Hungary’s
Viktor Orbán make common cause with David Cameron?

The one being a populist
Hungarian patriot in every sense of the word – including the economic sense –
and the other being … well, David Cameron, who certainly talks the talk of
national sovereignty but somehow manages to keep peddling slow-boil
privatisation?

But in this case they both seem to have a clear and relatively
well-founded sense that electing Jean-Claude Juncker to the presidency of the European
Commission would be a big step away from subsidiarity and from democracy within
the EU.

Juncker
clearly has not shown that great a respect for Greece’s national sovereignty,
having done his level best first to oversee the auctioning off of all of Greece’s
state assets and then to discredit Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras as ‘unfit’ to lead
the nation of which he is a part.

Cameron and Orbán do, in this case, share a
good and healthy instinct about the nature of his leadership. Tsipras’s own
support of Juncker simply shows the extent to which he is an
ideologically-consistent procedural democrat – including at the European
federal level.

However, it is clear in this case Juncker did and does not feel
the same way about Greek elections as Tsipras does now about European ones.

But
the alliance between Cameron and Orbán bespeaks the direness of the choice that
now faces Europe.

Britain has long been cautious with regard to what it sees as
its national integrity, and that from a long history of balancing itself between
involvement with and detachment from Europe, arguably goingall the way back to
Saxon times.

Think of the massive swing towards Continental involvement that
was accomplished at Saxon expense, cultural and economic, beginning with the
Bastard’s reign in 1066, which underwent a reversal only with Edward III’s
reforms and protections aimed at preserving and promoting the commons and the
English language nearly three hundred years later.

Orbán
is at times criticised in the Western press, such as the Financial Times, for
hypocrisy in adopting policies of nationalisation in despite of his
centre-right and anti-communist past.

But these criticisms are wholly
misdirected. Industrial nationalisation is not the sole intellectual property
of Marxism-Leninism, and Orbán understandably does not wish to see his nation placed again as firmly under the thumb of what he sees as an unaccountable
supranational power as it was under the Soviet Union.

This
being the consideration, it is understandable but nonetheless quite strange how
Poland and the Baltic nations can be so cavalier about joining and
participating in Euro-Atlanticist institutions, given their histories.

Srue,
they may feel that NATO and the EU can help to protect them from their
neighbour to the east. But do they actually believe that a commitment to the
ideology of European liberalism (however contested that commitment may be in
Poland, where the Catholic Church is still a powerful presence) is any true
guarantor of their respective national sovereignties?

It is not only because I
tend to sympathise more with the Eurasianist geopolitical perspective that I
feel Orbán’s scepticism on this point is far more intellectually defensible.
One need only examine the recent track record of that ideology in such places as Greece, Spain, Portugal and Romania.

Britain
likewise deserves the chance to express her independent foreign policy. But
this chance will only come for her, as it will only come for any other European
nation, when the deep links between the patriotism attaching to national
integrity and sovereignty, and economic patriotism (including in the forms of
national water, mail and rail), are explicated clearly.

Otherwise, national
sovereignty will remain little more than an empty slogan, as it remains
subverted by the private interests controlling the nation’s wealth, to which, pace Ricardo, the appeal to patriotism
has never been sufficiently strong to keep expensive capital from haemorrhaging
out of the nation’s borders, or cheap labour from flooding in.

This is not
merely a British problem, of course. Every nation in the world seems subject to
the dilemmas of such distorted politics.Make
no mistake – I find it very heartening to see Cameron leaning this way. But in
the end, I am convinced that Orbán will be shown right.

Only a party evincing
the ideals and priorities of old-fashioned Labour politics can rightly avail
itself of all the necessary intellectual and moral tools necessary
to safeguard the traditions and ancient honour of the British people and
nation.

In 2003, a Bahraini politician, Ahmed Juma, wrote a book called Using
Democracy to Stage a Coup. He was clear in stating that some of the
opposition societies’ core belief was not democracy.

Juma believed that some societies involved in the political process
would use democracy to stage a coup. No one paid attention.

In June 2014, many in Bahrain, including high ranking government
officials and media, were surprised at the Iran and USA interference in the
GCC, due to the “revelation” of the MEPI report which is, in fact, an archived
public document that was signed by the Ministry of Trade in 2003.

The US abused the agreement by requesting names of only shi’a students
whom they would train in various fields – their agenda was crystal clear.

Now, suddenly in disarray, government officials are frantically
scrambling to correct past lapses and continue on the same path of erroneous
commotion with reactive actions.

Proactive planning is still lacking. Ministries send contradictory
messages - making it obvious that there is no coherent policy in place.

The decision making process is rampant with bureaucratic delays and
pointless exercises that achieve very little. Ministers have not risen to the
challenge of the crisis nor do they appear to be motivated by the unrest in the
region – sadly, just business as usual.

The PM has endorsed empowerment, insisted on internal unity and fast
tracking of issues – but this simple instruction has still not been adopted.
Heads of State meeting leaders of countries is a necessity for the sake of
diplomacy.

However, who from the Bahrain government sector or NGOs are visible at
international forums or meetings with people at ground level at the EU, NATO,
UN or Congress?

Instead of a stream of entertaining photographs on social media during
visits abroad, would it not be more beneficial to Bahrain to see the people’s
mandate?

Apparently, the Foreign Office in Israel has five ambassadors and
over forty diplomats in their research departments. They remain ready and ahead
of the game. Have any of the regional Ministries invested in analysts?

This raises the question; how much importance does Bahrain or the Arab
world give to research and strategic planning?

Bahrain and the Arab world should never again be in a position where
policy makers are stunned with scenarios that are glaringly obvious. It may be
high time to evaluate the simple advice from the head of Bahrain’s Government
who has been persistent with moving forward to a GCC Union.

Since 2011, universities have not produced a report about the effects of
the unrest in Bahrain. Thousands of students at the University of Bahrain were
affected – why have they not prepared reports or organized seminars and
synopsis about the situation in Bahrain?

What type of outreach programmes are the other universities planning?
Academics ultimately are free to raise issues and must take the time and
initiative to address scenarios and publish papers or reports for the sake of
their country.

Despite all the attacks and sectarian clashes, why has the Ministry of
Education not published a comprehensive report to share with the world?

Obama believes the security of the American people is paramount, this
being his justification for killing innocent people in Pakistan and Yemen.

In 2011, Cameron said “this continued violence is simply not acceptable
and it will be stopped” – the roads were cleared of peaceful, unarmed
protestors within days.

On Saturday 25th June 2014, tens of thousands of British nationals
participated in the “No Austerity” protest to complain” about living standards
forcing millions into poverty and demanded that the UK end the cost of war in
blood; no military interventions”. They were demanding a fair, sustainable and
secure future.

It took the BBC over 24 hours to report this protest – and yet, the BBC
continues denouncing Bahrain at any given opportunity.

The Bahrain Prime Minister has repeatedly said that violence must stop
and foreign interference eliminated – neither has happened in over 3 years.

Bahrain and the Arab world should probably be contemplating:

What is the political stance with the EU?

Why did the EU tow the US line in Bahrain but
not during the Ukraine crisis?

Since the failure of the
“Greater Middle East Plan”, what will the West do now?

What are the likely new
“Greater Middle East Plans” and scenarios?

Why are we engaged
with a political party whose core belief is not democracy at any level?

What is the role and
what are the activities of Ambassadors?

Since Saykes Pcot is
declared dead after what happened in Iraq and the region – do the powers-to be
have grander plans for the region?

What is the role of the UN
office in Bahrain and what reports have they generated for the international arena?

While running
campaigns in selected areas through carefully chosen sources – why has the
Bahrain UN office not submitted truthful reports to their head office?

There has been
no positive statement reflecting social or economic developments from the UN
office and Navi Pillai and Ban Ki Moon have been harsh and unfair – but surely
their opinion is based on briefs coming directly from their local office?

Are we to
presume that the UN office is not being completely honest in its reporting
about Bahrain? Why are they not reporting accurately in the international
arena? Why is no-one in the government questioning the role of the UN office in
Bahrain?

Did we forget that on Sunday, 4th August 2013, US Embassies in Dhaka,
Doha, Kabul, Khartoum, Kuwait and Bahrain remained closed due to a “threat”
made in Yemen by “Al Qaeda”?

Bahrain, being safer than New York and London, did no-one suspect why
the embassy was mysteriously shut?

Masters at propaganda, America attracted attention to the Middle East,
by suggesting the CIA created Al Qaeda is a threat, thus deflecting
international media attention from the real menace – Hezbollah Bahrain, who
operate under the veil of the “democratic” Al Wefaq political party. Why
are they given so much visibility?

Did we forget that on 24th September 2013, during the 68th annual
session of the UN General Assembly, Obama said “efforts to resolve sectarian
tensions that continue to surface in places like Iraq, Bahrain and Syria” thus
proving that he had chosen to ignore the reality in Bahrain and substantiate
his role in the “Greater Middle East” agenda?

Why did none of Bahrain’s government officials condemn the President of
the US for his ignorant statement?

Backtracking will not resolve anything but policy makers must look
forward and analyse future plans that America, Iran and even the UK may have
for Bahrain and the rest of the GCC.

Did we forget what happened in Bahrain in 2011? For almost four years,
Al Wefaq armed militia used “peaceful” methods of shooting sharpened metal rods
through rocket launchers, molotovs and bombs to murder police and civilians –
yet, they continue to cry innocence.

Al Wefaq’s leaders continue to deliberately sacrifice their own youth
and despite recruiting young children to train to commit brutal violence, the
world sadly sits in sympathetic ignorant silence.

Almost every citizen and resident in Bahrain has spoken, written and
been vociferous against American, UK and Iranian interference in Bahrain – and
yet, parliament focused on more ‘important’ issues such as banning expatriates
from driving!

The premier has reiterated “those who targeted the Arab nation, using
democracy as a pretext to interfere in internal Arab affairs, have tended to
depict them as individuals who are deprived of their basic human rights, and
tackled disturbances as symptoms of a spring and chaos as demands.”

For decades, the PM has urged internal strength against outside
interference and the effects of disguised “democracy”.

Bahrain is in a cycle of continued violence, the region is in turmoil
with sectarian atrocities in Iraq and utter horror in Syria.

Will we lament in years to come? After all, they say history repeats
itself.

The Prime Minister of Bahrain continues to speak openly and
transparently; in fact, he predicted the current situation years ago and he
has been proven right

Tuesday, 24 June 2014

This
play is one of O’Casey’s lesser known works, but it is a timely revival, as the
subject matter is the First World War.

The play opens in a Dublin tenement, a
group of soldiers are about to return to the front. As the action unfolds we
see them interacting with their families, wives and girlfriends.

What gives the
play an edge in this year where there is so much commemoration, is its unique
perspective.

The First World War was the last war in which a United Ireland was
part of the British Empire and fought as such.

When the Easter Rising occurred
in 1916, many more Irishmen were being killed in the trenches than died in the
Rising.

The play reveals that the primary motive for many Irish working class
men in signing up was the money, the pay and payments supported their families
at home.

In
Act Two, the action moves to the frontline and we move to a more fantastical
presentational presentation of the war, though none the less horrific for that.

There is a running joke where a journalist visits the soldiers and dives for
cover every time he thinks they are being shelled.

This character reminded me of Blair and
Cameron visiting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and boring the poor soldiers
with their awful speeches.

The play then moves to a Dublin hospital and we see
the consequences of the fighting in disable and blinded soldiers.

Finally, it
ends with a grizzly party, where there is nothing to celebrate.

There
is much dark humour in the play, but leaving the theatre my abiding memory is
the horror of war, especially for these Irish veterans, as not only have they
suffered the fighting they have returned to a Southern Ireland which will
ignore them and their sacrifice, obsessed with the heroes of Irish
independence.

When
the play was first performed in the late 1920s, it was not a commercial success,
but this may have been as it followed shortly after the premier of Journey’s
End, another great play about the First World War.

Journey’s End gives the
perspective of the junior officers in the trenches, an interesting contrast to the
ordinary soldiers’ experience on display here.

With
the anniversary of the First World War we have already had the neocon Michael
Gove pronouncing how the War was quite a good thing.

That this journalist fool
is running England’s school is bad enough, but for him to be pronouncing on
history is embarrassing.

Still, let him go and see The Silver Tassie, and if he
still thinks war is so wonderful, let’s drop him with an AK-47 in the middle of
Iraq and see how he gets on.

The Liberal Party opposes the
European Union as currently constituted.

In particular, we oppose the
concept of a Single European Currency, harmonisation of taxes, and any move
towards a Single European Army.

It is without doubt untenable to
have a single currency without the discipline of a single economic government.

Europe has always been diverse in
terms of politics, religion, economics and social structures - imposing
uniformity is fundamentally illiberal.

The arrogance of the current EU
polite elite is actually aggravating the very social and political extremes
that the EU is supposedly here to prevent.

The claim that the EU has brought
peace is an insulting nonsense.

I do not wake every morning
worrying that the Norwegian Navy is to invade up the Thames as they do not
belong to the EU.

The reality is NATO has acted to
ensure peace Western and Central Europe more than the EU, whatever reservations
we have about USA predominance in NATO.

It is beyond doubt that NATO
tackled the Kosovo crisis whilst the EU was impotent.

I fear the current crisis in the
Ukraine has been aggravated by the EU seeking to expand east with a dangerous
contempt of legitimate Russian interests and an ignorance of history.

As Liberals, we believe in social
and economic diversity we support the concept of a Commonwealth of Europe in
which communities are free to operate their own economies, use their own
currencies and levy their own taxes, while making common cause on matters of
regional concern such as peace and the environment.

The Liberal Party seeks to reform
the European Union from within, working with the growing number of political
movements seeking reform.

We recognises that the
enlargement of the EU will have a substantial impact in stimulating trade and
prosperity, will protect democracy and human rights, and has already made a
significant contribution to political stability and international security in
Eastern Europe.

However, those countries should
be able to develop their own economic structures at a pace and direction of
their choice whilst ensuring common democratic standards.

It is worrying that the single
currency, and imposed financial structures on countries such as Cyprus and
Greece, are leading to a dangerous alienation of the populations, and are undermining
democracy itself.

There is no reason why a multi-track
Europe would not be more stable, with France, Germany and there Benelux
countries having a single currency.

There are pragmatic reasons why
the Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece should control
their own economies, rather than expect the EU to take responsibility and in
effect bail them out.

A more diverse Europe would also
be in a more flexible position to build bridges with Turkey.

When your esteemed
editor requested an article from me on the subject of 'being a Christopher
Hitchens Marxist in the Liberal Democrats', I wasn't sure whether to chortle or
bridle. Clearly I was being set up for a fall.

Still, it does no
harm to have to set out one's first principles and intellectual roots
occasionally, and while 'a Christopher Hitchens Marxist in the Lib Dems' is a
terribly reductive description of my political position, it's hardly an
inaccurate one.

And how does a
historical materialist find himself marching behind the tattered banners of
Comrade Clegg, fighting (and losing) local government elections in the
tribalist borderlands of North London? Good question.

I have always been a
man of the Left, steeped in and supportive of its egalitarian traditions. Not
uncommonly, the appeal of Marxism made itself felt when I was still in my
teens.

And, like so many
who feel that pull, I had my period of hammer-and-sickle-waving zeal. In truth
- and tellingly - my hammer and cycle was wrought from gold, suspended on a
fine gold chain.

Yet I was never a
dogmatic communist.

For me, the
explosive and truly revolutionary aspect of Marx's thought was not in his
narrow predictive abilities or even his political programme, but in his
exposing of the link between technological and societal change.

Along with
contemporaries like Freud, Marx demolished the narrative of an organic society
that had been so central to all previous ideologies.

Which is not to say
that this demolition has had the profound consciousness-raising affect on human
society that it ought to have done.

I am often reminded
of a killer question posed by my bearded and twinkle-eyed Sociology teacher.

He had instilled in
us the well-evidenced understanding that nurture is more important than nature
in determining social outcomes, an understanding accepted as fact by almost all
social scientists.

But which two
groups, he asked, hold on to the organicist illusion?

His answer has never
left me (and may have influenced my occasional tendency towards intellectual
elitism): a) the media, and b) the public. False consciousness has deep roots.

Thus for me the
attraction of Marxism was always more intellectual and academic than, shall we
say, 'party political'.

I considered myself
an extension of the old joke about there being three Trotskyist parties for
every two Trotskyists - I wanted no party at all.

By temperament I
remained sceptical of the call to submit myself to the rigours of 'democratic
centralism' or partake in interminable debates about the futility of
parliamentary democracy.

And anyway, I was
and remain really rather fond of parliamentary democracy, despite its cracks
and flaws and farcicalities.

The warnings of
Orwell cut deep, too. Whatever our egalitarian sympathies, however obvious the
need for radical or revolutionary change (and however pressing the need for one
to have that unfettered and unrestricted power in one's own hands, in the
interest of the public of course, along with the right violently to purge one's
foolish enemies at will), the seductions and temptations of authoritarianism
and totalitarianism must always be fiercely resisted.

Indeed, in truth I
was as enamoured with the tradition of Locke, Mill, Bentham, and Kant as I was
that of Marx and his fellow critical theorists.

For what are
equality and fraternity without liberty?

And not just liberty
from the undue encroachment of the state (though the importance of that cannot
be overstated), but the freedom from the insidious oppression of society
itself: the poison of patriarchy and machismo, the straitjackets of gender and
sexual norms, the crippling parochialism of nationalism and xenophobia, and the
intellectual bankruptcy of anti-intellectualism, of organicism, and the
wearying, mind-numbing crassness of so-called 'common sense'.

And so onto the
late, great Christopher Hitchens, a man utterly alien to such restrictions.

Though I only
discovered his work in the last decade or so of his life - when he noisily
joined Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in their public roles as
the 'Four Horseman of the Counter-Apocalypse' - his fierce writing and furious
public personae had a profound influence on me.

I saw him speak in
person but once, but I will never forget his fearsome oratory.

He was a titan of
the humanist, anti-totalitarian left. It was as though the man could articulate
my own thoughts before I had even thought them.

A Marxist who
favoured Trotsky over Lenin, and Luxemburg over both. A devotee of the
enlightenment, who confessed to a "sort of Whiggish" belief in human
progress, but retained a profound scepticism concerning the promises of
demagogues and authoritarians.

Not merely a
secularist or atheist, but an anti-theist, who out-Orwelled Orwell in his
understanding that religion was the seed of totalitarianism.

I was profoundly
influenced by his loss, and it is rare for a day to go by without my wishing I
could hear his articulate rage at the latest gross injustice.

Like The Hitch, I
remain a historical materialist with a penchant for the dialectic.

Hitchens said of
himself that he was "a Marxist who was no longer a socialist" - I'm
fond of the term Marxish - and like him I find myself part of that long
line of people and parties who struggle to balance and reconcile the
egalitarian principles of the Left with the critical safeguards of the Liberal
tradition.

Marx believed that
capitalism would not be replaced until it had exhausted its ability to adapt
and renew itself. In retrospect it is easy to see that he somewhat
underestimated capitalism's ability to do just that.

Hitchens recognised
that capitalism, especially in its latest hyper-globalist phase, was
"innovative and internationalist", and rather convincingly noted that
those parts of the world that are the most oppressive and authoritarian are
those where the bourgeois revolution has stalled.

And, to stick with
historical materialism for a moment: among the most important lessons of the
20th century is that in a world of boundary-dissolving globalisation you cannot
build 'socialism' in one country. Poor Trotsky was proved to be right about
that in the end.

The global movement
of capital, of people, of culture and ideas, are rapidly dissolving the
socioeconomic foundations of the seventeenth-century sovereign state model and
its bastard eighteenth-century offspring, the nation state.

We can learn the
lessons of the past to look ahead - in my view a globalised world requires more
than feeble and anarchic global governance, it needs global government.

It needs
transnational, cosmopolitan, democratised institutions in which we can rebuild,
safeguard, and underpin the social democracy that we see being eroded at the
level of nation state.

This idea, with its
routes in Aristotle, Dante and Kant, has been renewed of late in the work of
democratic cosmopolitan writers as diverse as Danile Archibugi, David Held, and
George Monbiot. There is much more to be done.

This is not a
trivial matter – technological progress and the gradual dissolving of the old
social order mean that we are just as likely to end up in the authoritarian and
impersonal grimness of Mega City One than the post-scarcity utopia of Star
Trek.

We must not abandon
Marx's exhortation to think ahead, and think radically. To shed old narratives
and intellectual shackles.

Nationalism is just
as much an opiate of the people as religion was (and in some places still is).
Like Hitchens, I like to recall the neglected follow up to Marx's famous opium
dig:

"...the
criticism of religion … has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not
so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that
he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower."

And yet it's nice to
have people to cull flowers with, and to plant them, too. Am I a socialist libertarian? A social liberal? A
social democrat? Labels matter less than ideas, less than practice (or,
to utilise the delightful Marxist term, praxis).

Marx said that we
should seek not just to understand the world, but to change it.

In my own small way
I have being trying to contribute to my community as best I can - a little
volunteering here, a campaign or two there.

Nor am I still
immune to the pull of party politics and the grubby realities of elections. But
what party could accommodate an eccentric like me?

It would have to be
pluralist rather than majoritarian. Anti-nationalist, cosmopolitanism and
transnationalist rather than merely internationalist.

Committed to
egalitarianism - and showing an understanding of the societal harm that
inequality causes - but hesitant to be over-reliant on statism to achieve its
goals.

Deeply sceptical of
social conservatism of any kind.

It would need to
abhor the shambles of our outdated constitutional arrangements, and see the
folly of entrenched perma-failure policies such as the 'war on drugs'.

It would need to be
a contemplative and rationalist party, rejecting tribalism, indifferent to
emotional reasoning, and cognisant of the dangers of identity politics.

This, dear comrades,
is how I find myself in the Liberal Democrats.

Not always an easy
place to be, especially in these interesting times. But, for all their flaws,
they are a thoughtful and indefatigable bunch.

And I tend to think,
in my Marxish way, that they are on the right side of history.

Friday, 20 June 2014

A few weeks ago I was proud to launch a discussion report
entitledAchieve Support,
which is a detailed proposal for a new single assistance and support assessment
and allocation system and process for disabled and older people.

Its central aim of the proposal is to replace all the
current disability benefits as well as adult social care funding streams into
one new system, managed nationally by a new body, Support England, and
delivered locally by new support bodies that are independent from local
government.

More importantly the funding provided would be outcome
based, determined on what individuals specifically need, not on labels and
artificial lines of ‘fitness’.

I wrote the report myself, with some input from various
colleagues in the disability and social care sectors, and it was intended for
the consumption of Labour, after a meeting I had with Liz Kendall as shadow
minister for care services.

The report is not perfect and I regard it as a starting
point in what will be a long journey to its realisation.

But as the basics of the idea is something I have had for
years, I am more than hopeful that eventually my idea will be a reality in some
form, because it makes sense.

I kept an open mind when the coalition came to power and
made an effort to reach my own conclusions to their policies, as oppose to
simply jumping on the anti-cuts bandwagon without having my own thoughts.

And I have now reached my own conclusion that the welfare
reform is in a mess for enormous reasons that most readers will be very aware
of. ESA and WCA is too toxic to continue, bedroom tax hit the wrong people, PIP
is in chaos and Universal Tax Credits is nowhere to be seen.

In preparing my report, I looked carefully at what has not
been working and why, such as the fact that WCA and the interaction with ATOS
ignores the emotional journey to ‘getting better’ and being ready to return to
work.

I want to build a system that works with disabled and older
people, not against them, but at the same time it has to be fair and I did not
want to fall into the trap of making it a list of demands of what disabled and
older people wanted without any consideration for the economic realities of
delivering assistance and support.

It is clear sanctions are not working and while I want a
system that starts with big juicy carrots, in the background, there does need
to be a clear and transparent stick to fairly manage those who refuse to
properly engage with the system, as citizenship is about rights and
responsibilities.

I would argue society would be more accepting of the
inclusion of disabled people if a rights and responsibilities framework to
assistance and support was provided.

As the next election quickly approaches I must ask if my
idea is Labour’s best chance of getting it right for a generation?

The Care Act is nothing more than moving deckchairs on the
Titanic, whose implementation will be far more disastrous than the welfare
reforms. DWP is in melt down and please do not get me started about the state
of HMRC.

The country is crying out for real major reform and a
government that is prepared to be brave enough to deliver it.

It is important to understand Disabled and older people are
a few steps away from claiming their inclusion as fully contributing members of
society if the right policies were put in place.

I think my biggest fear, other than my idea being ignored
(if I would allow that happen), is that my proposal is knocked into something
out off all recognition to what was intended after all the interests groups
have their say, who could twist the objectives to suit their agendas, and so
like many policies in social care, it will become meaningless and no different
to the mess we have now.

This is why I have being upfront that I would like to be
the first Chair of Support England, because this proposal will need strong
leadership if it is going to be as successful as I know it can be.

Labour has the opportunity to reinvent assistance and
support for disabled and older people, and my proposal is the starting point
they need, only time will tell if they have to courage to deliver.

I am a leading independent disability issues consultant,
researcher, trainer, controversial inclusion activist, campaigner, and social
change agent, based in Coventry (UK) with vast experience and expertise in a
wide range of fields including disability equality, independent living, health
policy, social care, lifestyle advocacy, employing personal assistants and
Secondlife.

I have worked with many organisations of all types since
1992 nationally and internationally and I am also founder and owner of
Wheelies, the world's first disability themed virtual nightclub, and star of
Channel 4's disability prank showI'm
Spazticus, as well as being a blogger for the Huffington Post.

I also have cerebral palsy that affects my speech, balance, hand control and
sense of humour (in a positive way).

Sunday, 15 June 2014

Councils in the North East are losing
£665 per person an average, compared to £305 in the South East.

Durham County Council is losing
£242m by 2017, nearly 2000 council staff made redundant, affecting frontline
service, education (home to school transport), libraries (reduced hours), and
transport (withdrawal of bus services).

According the Institute of Public
Policy Research, transport spending for the North East is £5 per head, whereas
in the London it is £2,731.

The Government has failed to
“make work pay”.

At Prime Minister’s Questions, David
Cameron told us that “the best route out of poverty is work.” But this is empty
rhetoric.

Two thirds of children in poverty live in working households.

There are over five million low
paid workers in the United Kingdom, earning less than the living wage. That figure
up from 3.4m in 2009.

The number of people in work
claiming housing benefit is up 59% since 2010, costing an extra £5 billion. Wages
have fallen on average by £1600 a year under Cameron.

An Oxfam Report details that Food
Banks and Food Aid charities gave more than 20 million meals last year to
people in UK who could not afford to feed themselves.

Locally, Durham Food Bank,
established in 2011, saw a 264% increase in demand in first two years.

In 2011,
3209 people were fed by it. In 2013, the figure was 11,684. It is regularly
feeding 1,300 people each month.

The main reasons for food bank usage are
benefit delays (36%), benefit changes (21%) and low income (17%).

The Bedroom Tax has affected
1,300 families in East Durham. It costs low income families £850,000 in East
Durham, money that would otherwise be spent in the local economy, supporting
jobs and services.

County Durham, Newcastle and Sunderland are among the top 10
hardest-hit areas in the UK.

The North East has lost economic
support and representation in Government.

One North East has been abolished; it
had invested £2.7bn into regional economy, attracted and created 19,000 new
businesses, and created and safeguarded 160,000 jobs.

The Coalition has
scrapped the Regional Minister, reducing the voice of the North East in
Government.

The local and European elections
should have served as a wake-up call to all political parties.

The public
expressed its discontent with politics.

They believe that those who run the
country fail to understand their problems, and that political parties are more
concerned with the Westminster bubble than tackling the real issues affecting
their lives.

Unfortunately, there was nothing
in the Queen’s Speech to persuade the public any differently.

For ordinary people, things are getting harder,
not easier, under this Government. Hardworking people are £1,600 a year worse
off.

Families are paying £300 more on their energy bills. And at a time when
people are working longer and harder for less, raising a family has become more
difficult as childcare costs have risen by almost a third.

The nation needed a Queens’s Speech
that would rise to these challenges, but instead we were presented with more of
the same by a coalition more concerned with its own internal politics than with
the issues facing the general public.

One out of three children in the North
East is now living in poverty, and two thirds of young people in poverty live
in a working household.

My Honourable Friend the Member for Wansbeck, Ian
Lavery MP, raised this point at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. But David
Cameron had nothing to say on the matter.

The Government keeps telling us
that employment is the route out of poverty, but for many parents hard work is
not even enough to provide an acceptable standard of living for their children.

In the North East, full-time workers are now £36 a week less well-off than they
were a year ago. The link between economic growth
and living standards is broken.

It is ordinary people that were
made to pay for this Government’s policy of austerity.

After enduring three
years of cuts and a flat-lining economy, it cannot be right that now the
economy is recovering, ordinary people are not the ones benefitting.

When an economy grows, wages
should grow, too.

That is why I am proud that Labour has pledged to raise the
value of the minimum wage over the next Parliament, to move towards a living
wage for businesses that can afford to pay it, and to introduce a lower 10p
starting rate of tax.

You can only call an economic
recovery successful if it is being felt throughout society, not just in a few
clusters of privilege.

This is something that the Coalition patently fails to
understand.

In the North East, 6,860 people aged 16 to 18, or 7.6%, are not in
education, employment or training, the highest proportion of any region.

Long term youth unemployment has
jumped by 60% under this Government. The cost of long-term youth unemployment
is £350m a year and £3.2bn over the lifetime of the young unemployed.

And in my constituency the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance
for more than two years is on the rise.

Clearly, this is not an economy that is benefiting people equally.

The North East, and especially young people in the North East, remain out
of sight and out of mind for this Tory-led Government.

We urgently need action to get
local people into work.

I am proud that Labour is calling for a compulsory jobs
guarantee, which will get any adult out of work for more than two years, or
young person out of work for a year, into a job.

But my constituents should not
be made to wait another year for a Government to take action to improve their
lives.

Real action, not empty rhetoric,
is what is required.

Families struggling to make ends
meet need relief from overburdening energy bills in the form of Labour’s
Consumers Bill to freeze energy prices until 2017 and reform the energy market.

Parents struggling to cope with
balancing the demands of work and childcare will be better off with Labour,
with 25 hours of free childcare.

And the 1.4m workers who are on zero hours contracts but
working regular hours, need a Government to step in to provide them with a
proper, regular contract that brings the security that a full-time job should
deliver.

The Queen’s Speech missed an important opportunity to tackle the
deep-seated causes of poverty and inequality in this country.

What the public require is an
economy that delivers for the many, not just the few, and a Government prepared
to deal with the real issues affecting their lives.

The Coalition’s last stand has shown they are
unable to deliver the change we need.

We need a real alternative.

However, for that, we shall have to wait until 7th May 2015.Grahame Morris is the Member of Parliament for Easington.

Only a
generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and
their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two
professional salaries today.

This
impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including
almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it
has happened.

But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.

If fathers
matter, then they must face up to their responsibilities, with every
assistance, including censure where necessary, from the wider society,
including when it acts politically as the State.

A legal
presumption of equal parenting. Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers
for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers.

Restoration of the
requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s
need for a father.

Repeal
of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child’s parents on a
birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men
to be so listed.

And for
paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left
school, thereby reasserting paternal authority, and thus requiring paternal
responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence.

Of course a new
baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old might very well need her father, and
that bit of paternity leave that he has been owed these last 15 years.

That
authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State
can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver.

That
basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public
policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need.

Not least,
that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State
are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure
the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider
community.

So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.

Moreover,
paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their
children and harvested in wars.

Especially, though not exclusively, since those
sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have
children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm.

Think of
those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing
their tiny children.

You can
believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and
possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not
necessarily in the past or in principle.

Wednesday, 4 June 2014

There has been surprisingly little
comment on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Dare
we hope that someone might finally have looked into exactly who those
demonstrators were? I for one would love to know.

Statue of Liberty or no Statue of Liberty, they sang The Internationale in Tiananmen Square.

After all, one certainly does not need
to be an advocate of liberal democracy to be an opponent of the regime in
China. And various other types of such opponent are decidedly more numerous and
long-established in China even today, never mind 25 years ago.There is the Kuomintang. There are the Xinjiang
Islamists, and the people who want to restore life expectancy in Tibet to half its
current level by bringing back theocratic feudalism, and a number of equally
unpleasant separatist tendencies elsewhere.There are the Trotskyists, and
those Stalinists who are not Maoists.

There are now, and up to a point there
were even in 1989, those who hold to the old, old Maoist faith against China’s
transformation into the giant standing contradiction of the theory that
capitalism and freedom go hand in hand. And many more besides.

It is impossible to overstate the
absolute imperative to remain out of these things, which is no small part of the
absolute imperative to have no part in any pretence that that thing holed up on
Taiwan is the Government of China, or that Taiwan is a country (those two are
in any case mutually exclusive propositions), any more than something holed up
on the Isle of Wight at the end of a British Civil War would be the Government
of Britain, or would make the Isle of Wight a country, likewise mutually
exclusive propositions.

The self-styled Republic of China
has had extremely few Western partisans since Nixon and the UN faced up to
reality, but it had friends among the Crazies around Bush the Younger, and it
would have them in and around any Administration headed by Hillary Clinton.
Michael Gove and Liam Fox are probably fans.

It has no aspiration to Taiwanese
independence, which is an absurd idea. Nor does it claim jurisdiction only over
China as she now exists. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese
Government to resolve territorial disputes, it lays claim to all of Mongolia,
as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan
and Burma.

We must have nothing, absolutely
nothing, to do with it.

In addition to backing China in
her territorial dispute with Japan, a dispute in which no other country ought
to take any part, David Cameron is seeking a “Free Trade” Agreement between
China and the European Union, so as to do to European workers what Most Favored
Nation Status for China has done for American workers.

Labour has already made as clear
as need be that it intends to vote against the “Free Trade” Agreement between
the US and the EU, so this is just another one to add.

In both cases, there might have
to be um-ing and ah-ing about how some other Agreement would have been
acceptable, but regrettably not the only one on offer. So what, though? The
effect would be exactly the same.

We are told that the only
alternative to this approach, an approach which old hippies actively prefer, is
sucking up to the Dalai Lama.

Rubbish.

The present Dalai Lama was born
hundreds of miles outside Tibet. The Tibetans themselves migrated to what is
now Tibet from further east in China, but huge numbers of them never did and
never have done. The Dalai Lama comes from one such family.

Before 1959, Tibet was not an
independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost
entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai
Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the
lamas were drawn. “Dalai” is a family name; only a member of the House of Dalai
can become the Dalai Lama.

Well over 90 per cent of the
population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers
of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because
successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the
“autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet
was half what it is today.

There has never been an
independent state of Tibet. Likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han
(ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet
is nothing remotely new. The one-child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the
Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a
problem.

It is totally false to describe
the Dalai Lama baldly as “their spiritual leader”. Relatively few would view
him as such. In particular, Google “Dorje Shugden” for, to put at its mildest,
some balance to the media portrayal of the present Dalai Lama. We never hear from Dorje Shugden practitioners, just as we never hear from the loyally Chinese Hui Muslims.

Moreover, the Dalai Lama has
never condemned either the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq. For
more on Buddhism as no more a religion of peace than Islam is, see Sri Lanka,
Burma, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, and beyond.

In fact, an examination of the
relevant texts shows that violence in general and war in particular are
fundamental to Buddhism. Tibet is particularly striking
for this.

Not for nothing is it Christianity that is fashionable among the Bangkok hipsters who are among the victims of the ongoing military coup in Thailand. Something similar was no small part of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, and then, through the court influence of Anglo-Saxon kings’ Frankish brides, to that of what was thus turned into England.

Just as pre-Communist Russia always
remained the country’s true character, so very pre-Communist China remains the
country’s true character.

That character reveres tradition
and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the
Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, is now thoroughly Classical and
Patristic in taking Africa seriously, and has barely started an external war
since China became China five thousand years ago. It is especially open to
completion by, in, through and as classical, historic, mainstream Christianity.

China has already moved from
Maoism to the equal repressiveness of unbridled capitalism.

While economic, or
any other, dependence on a foreign power remains totally unacceptable, a
further shift, the reassertion of her own culture, is to be encouraged by every
means of the “soft” power that, in reality, is truly hard power.